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Julia Child: Cooking With Flair

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Ruth Lockwood, her producer now for the past 12 years, says, "Julia wants to show you how to do things properly. And if something goes wrong -- which it does from time to time with all of us -- she wants to make you feel confident enough to correct it. She wants to help other cooks eliminate the worry and fear of failure."

One result of this demystifying process and of exposing the art of good cooking to a mass audience is that Julia Child has put fun and satisfaction back into the American kitchen.

"The kitchen should be the core of the home with a lot going on in it all the time," she says convincingly. "The way to get people involved with each other is to involve them over food. Good eating and good company are marks of civilized living, don't you agree? Without them we'd all be savages."

For her work and pleasure Julia Child collects kitchen tools -- a wall of heavy copper pots and pans, pegboards where each artifact hangs in its assigned place handy to an appropriate work area, drawers and cabinets organized with kitchen gadgets that combine the old and new. A food processor and a durable mixer stand at strategic points near electrical outlets behind the counter.

In the basement storage area there is even more. Now that her latest series of televised cooking lessons for Boston's Channel 2 has been wrapped up, the familiar equipment has been transferred to the cellar, where it will be handy for another cross-country tour to promote her latest book, the one she's working on, Julia Child and More Company.

She is a professional cook who has the right tool for the right job, but she is also an unselfconscious performer who does everything with a flair and never seems to be at a loss when the unexpected happens. In fact, she is so well fortified with technical cooking skills that she seems to welcome the unusual, and always turns it to her own advantage, as if saying to her audience, "This is part of it. It happens to everyone. Now let's see what we can do about it.

"Of course there are slips, dishes that don't come out as expected. But when you master the technique, you can learn to correct mistakes and even live comfortably with them. If the sauce is too thin, thicken it. If the Hollandaise is lumpy, dice up hard-boiled eggs to justify the lumps. If the mousse fails, turn it into a delicious soup.

"But the real key to cooking is never to apologize. Present your meal as it is. But present it with a flourish. It's really a matter of self-preservation, isn't it?"

Born in Pasadena, California, the eldest of three children, Julia Child admits she came to cooking relatively late. She grew up in a house similar to the one the Childs live in now. Her mother was originally from western Massachusetts, so it seemed natural for Julia to come East for her education. After graduating from Smith College, she was soon drawn to Manhattan. She dreamed then of writing for a national magazine, but took a job instead with a large department store. She says now it trained her to be a stickler for observed detail that was later reinforced when World War II broke out and she worked for the OSS in Ceylon and China. It was there she met Paul.

They were married after the war was over, and Paul Child accepted a State Department assignment in Paris. After six months of lessons at the Cordon Bleu to learn the fundamentals of cooking French style, Julia continued private lessons with several French chefs.